Join the Asian Futures Initiative for Darren Byler's lecture, "Capitalist Frontier-Making in Northwest China: Technologies of Muslim Enclosure, Dispossession and Subtraction."
Anthropologist Darren Byler shows that the mass detention of over one million Muslims in “reeducation camps” is part of resource extraction in Uyghur and Kazakh lands that have led to what he calls terror capitalism. This talk will show how digital infrastructures (built in Seattle, Beijing and Xinjiang) combine with state-corporate counterterrorism to produce new forms of Muslim enclosure, dispossession and, ultimately, a subtraction of their life itself. He particularly attends to the experiences of youth who were made the primary target of state violence and how they cope with novel forms of unfreedom. By tracing the political and economic stakes of this emergent internal colonial project, Darren Byler demonstrates that state-directed capitalist dispossession is co-constructed with relations of domination that are truly global.
Anthropologist Darren Byler is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of an ethnographic monograph titled Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press 2022) and a narrative-driven book titled In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports 2021). His current research and teaching is focused on infrastructure development, policing and carceral theory, and global China.
This event is free and open to the public.
For more information, email humanitiescollaboratory@osu.edu.
The Humanities Institute and its related centers host a wide range of events, from intense discussions of works in progress to cutting-edge presentations from world-known scholars, artists, and activists, and everything in between.
In our current moment of riding the unpredictable currents of the pandemic, we reaffirm the value of in-person engagement. We strive to amplify the energy in the room. But we also recognize the need to be careful and the fact that not all our guests will be able to visit our space. We, therefore, will continue to offer Zoom access to all our events upon request. If you wish to have such access, please send your request to humanitiescollaboratory@osu.edu.
